Life in Brooklyn's Forgotten Section; In Red Hook, 3-Year-Olds Hear Gunfire and Duck for Cover

Carmen Cruz stood silently alongside the worn and windswept patch of dirt and grass that cut through the mall in the center of the Red Hook Houses, just steps from where Patrick Daly lay mortally wounded the day before. Her friend Elizabeth Gonzalez crouched by a small wooden fence post, pounding a nail into an index card that would become part of the flower-strewn memorial to the grade school principal they and their children had known, loved and ultimately grieved for in the quarter-century he walked among them.

"You was an angel," the card read. "Now get your wings."

Ms. Cruz wondered if the time had come for her to fly away, too. She has lived in the same apartment in the Red Hook Houses for half her 41 years, raising four children in the shadow of violence and far from the eye of the rest of the city. She tried to start anew in Texas this summer but returned discouraged after three months in which she alternated between low wages and no wages.

"I came back here because it is the only place I have," said Ms. Cruz, who hopes to get a job in social services after completing a job training program. "Now my kids want to leave again after this tragedy. They're scared to come out. They're even scared to be in the house because of the shots."

Fear, drugs and guns have been part of the Red Hook landscape as much as the towering rows of red-brick apartment towers that line the housing project mall where on Thursday morning Mr. Daly walked into what the police say was the crossfire between rival drug dealers.

Such gunplay is common in the project. But residents remember when it wasn't so, and they remember Mr. Daly as someone who reminded them that the future held promise even for children whose early education includes lessons in ducking for cover.

Now, with Mr. Daly's death, some residents wonder if their community will ever be free of the armed urban terrorists whose numbers are small but whose violence has drastically altered the daily rhythms of the hard-working families and single mothers trying to raise their children. Others, retired from work or finished with raising their families are now talking about leaving.

"I'm going to go so far from here there ain't no coming back," said R. M. Jones, who prides herself on singlehandedly seeing her two daughters through school and helping keep crime out of her building through her work in a tenant patrol. Now, she does not call the police when she spots an intruder or hears a burst of gunfire because she fears retaliation from drug dealers. As soon as her 17-year-old daughter finishes high school, she plans to move from the city, which she feels has ignored the community that sits, cut off from the rest of Brooklyn by the Gowanus Canal, on a spit of land that juts into New York Harbor.

"I'm putting my mother on my back and taking her with me," she said. "This place is sinful. There's a lot of good people here. Tax-dollar-paying people. We deserve better."

The Red Hook Houses, among the largest public housing complexes in the nation, dominates much of the area, which once bustled with rough and tumble activity along its ports and piers. Vestiges of that world can still be found along the waterfront, where cobblestoned streets run past blocks of uneven slate sidewalks and clumps of dry, brown weeds. Other corners of the community, past the projects, are dotted with brick row houses, and three-story apartment buildings are home to old-time Italian and Irish residents. Steady Decline

The community is ethnically mixed and free of the racial strife that has riven other parts of the borough. It is the kind of place where those who have lived there a decade are still "new people" to other residents.

It is hard to escape the looming cluster of the buildings in the housing project, many of which are six stories tall, where first-floor windows are secured with child guards on the outside and iron gates inside. Some 10,000 people -- at least 40 percent of them in poverty -- live in the housing projects, nearly 40 percent of them under 18 years of age. There are almost equal numbers of black and Hispanic residents, who account for about 90 percent of the housing project's population.

Longtime residents lament the steady decline of their neighborhood, which while always gritty, became deadly with the advent of crack and its enforcers about a decade ago. The place was so orderly that parents would be warned by management if their children rode their bikes down the wide walkways and square plazas.

"The halls used to be spick and span," said a 58-year-old woman who has lived there since 1962 with her husband, a Transit Authority employee, and their three children. "If anybody got in trouble, they'd throw you out. Maintenance would come in 15 minutes. Now it takes five or six days to get anything fixed." Dealers on Patrol

The woman, who would not give her full name, recalled how years ago her youngest son, who is now in college, romped outside, while she could leave her apartment door wide open.

"Before you didn't have no crime," she said. "Now, I got three locks on my door and gates on my windows."

Eduardo Colon, 14, who lives a few blocks away from the projects, said some youths didn't take seriously the impact of the violence. "People laugh when somebody gets killed," he said. "It's a big joke."

He worried that the drug dealers were killing off the good people, like Mr. Daly.

A dog barked in the distance.

"Even the dogs hate people here."

Where children once played, drug dealers now stand, controlling the wide public spaces whose sidewalks and plazas between buildings are up for grabs. Inside, too.

"They sell in buildings and they don't care if you got kids around," said Eric Smith, a 32-year-old man who has lived in the projects much of his life. He walked down one of the many paths that snake through the projects, cradling his infant daughter. "They got control around here."

The powerless stay inside.

A woman who said she worked in the guidance department at Public School 15, said she rues the day six years ago she moved into the Red Hook Houses, after a fire drove her and her son from their apartment in the High Bridge section of the Bronx. The woman, who would not give her full name, said she had been assaulted once by a woman who clubbed her with a hunk of free cheese when she thought she had jumped a food distribution line. Her son, who was taunted by a local girl, has few friends in the neighborhood. Besides, she said, they venture to other parts of Brooklyn when they want to divert themselves with a movie or other entertainment.

"I'm not used to living like this," she said as she walked her dog, a small, scruffy mutt she got for protection. "If you're not on drugs, you're not one of them, so you have to isolate yourself. I like to be friendly, but you get hurt by people. It's not a healthy way of life."

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Young people know they have been denied the chance to do a lot of things that others their age take for granted. Children in Hiding

"I don't go outside; it's ridiculous," said an 18-year-old who declined to give her name. "There's nothing for us to do." She worried most about those still growing up, diving for cover when they hear gunshots outside.

"How can you raise a child that way?" she said. "A 3-year-old hears a shot and hides behind a couch -- and they live on the third floor?"

Yet children are raised, and some succeed despite the obstacles. "A lot of people are fighting, are going to school," said William Green, the administrator of the South Brooklyn Health Center. "Our pediatric population is the best-taken-care-of population we see. They're well nourished, well dressed and cared for by their parents."

The Rev. John Waldron, the sole priest and pastor of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Roman Catholic Church, said that in some parts of the projects, tenants had organized effective associations that have kept thier buildings from tumbling into chaos. And while the face of crime is getting discouragingly younger, he knows of youths who are going on to college and good jobs.

Needs remain, and he would like to transform his parish's old grammar school building, which was closed in 1975, into a community center, adding to a small core of centers that cater to the youths in the area.

The important thing, he said, is to fight the apathy that can sink in when living in a community that is physically -- if not psychically -- severed from the rest of the borough. "There's a feeling of being overlooked and neglected," he said. "You start to accept whatever comes your way."

But there have been encouraging signs, he said. Residents successfully blocked the construction of a sewage disposal plant this year, and there is new economic life along the waterfront, holding out the promise of jobs in an area where those who work often have to spend their first hour's wages on fares to get to work in Manhattan.

"I'm a person of hope," he said. "I still see enough hope to think it has to get better."

The Housing Authority police said that violent crime in the Red Hook Houses has been decreasing in recent years, and that there have been only two murders this year, compared with six the previous year. Residents and those who work in the area say crime may be down, but guns and drugs are not.

He added that since Mr. Daly's death on Thursday, residents have begun circulating a petition asking state lawmakers to stiffen the penalties for possessing and and firing guns. "There has got to be some concept that not only will you get arrested for having one," Mr. Green said, "but you are endangering the lives of thousands of people in the projects."

A few blocks away on Van Brunt Street, few shops remain along blocks that once brimmed with bakeries, barbershops and other stores. But not all trace its initial downfall to the advent of crack.

Andy Massaro was born in Red Hook 63 years ago, once worked on the piers as a longshoreman for the Barber Line and now owns a cluttered toy shop known to all as Skinny's, for the name that most people use for him.

"What happened here is during the war everybody went into defense and they made big bucks," he said. "When they made big bucks, they left to Staten Island and left us with all the garbage."

Despite his tough words, he dotes on an 8-year-old girl who wants to buy one of the many toys he purchases in damaged condition and repairs for sale at a discount. Children aren't born bad, he said, but something happens along the way -- he's seen it happen to his son, who he said nearly wiped him out with a crack habit.

The street outside his store was dark and nearly deserted when Cathy, a red-haired bundle of nerves, swept into his store and asked for a dollar. She used to work for the post office, but resigned after 20 years, she said. She used to have a house down the block, she said, but she lost it after years of using it as a shooting gallery where she and her friends used heroin. She lives on the streets now, walking countless times each day by her old house, which stands boarded up and empty.

"She tried to commit suicide four or five times," said Mr. Massaro after he gave her a dollar. "But God don't want her."

He said that although he didn't venture outside at night, he didn't feel like a prisoner. "The people in the projects, they're trapped," he said.

Another man ducked his head into his store, seeking a handout. Mr. Massaro waved him off.

"Satan himself is walking the earth," he said. "These kids' souls are taken."

We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports,
and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on December 20, 1992, on Page 1001037 of the National edition with the headline: Life in Brooklyn's Forgotten Section; In Red Hook, 3-Year-Olds Hear Gunfire and Duck for Cover. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe